The ruse was spoiled when Cleggmania struck last week, following the revelation that there is already a liberal, caring and modernist party called the Liberal Democrats, and what is more their leader is only half as transparently slimy and power hungry as "Call me Dave".

Once the polls began to show that voters preferred the real modernisers to the Tory imitation, the Conservative election strategists and their advertising agencySachet & Sachet worked quickly to devise a new plan.

They decided that the best course of action would be to drop the pretence of being progressive and try to shore up their traditional voter base and to win back some Tory deserters to UKIP with a grand demonstration of traditional Tory hatred and intolerance. They decided the best way to do this was to find a scapegoat to attack, but they found that their traditional targets of Blacks and Gays were now protected by pesky human rights legislation so they turned their attention to another traditional enemy, the unemployed.

At first they tried the slogan "Let's cut the benefits of those who refuse to work" but found that was already a long established Labour Party strategy, so they went one step further in their efforts to heal "Broken Britain" by targeting the children of the unemployed.

A Conservative spokesman said that "it is a well known fact that 80% of children to have lived with unemployed parents have gone on to become habitual criminals. If we kill them as soon as the parents become unemployed we will be preventing a future crime wave and will also prevent the lazy parents from sponging more money out of the state through child benefit."

Critics have claimed that the Tories have once again got their figures all wrong and that only 0.8% of such children become habitual criminals.